The True Origins of Six Sigma: Insights from David Hutchins

What seems to have been lost—perhaps intentionally rather than by accident—are the true origins of the Six Sigma methodology and why the term “Six Sigma” was used at Motorola.

We’ve been speaking to someone who was in the room when the term “Six Sigma” was first mentioned! David Hutchins is one of the few (perhaps the only one) who knows the facts as they happened!

David Hutchins was at the ASQ conference in Anaheim in 1989 when Bob Galvin, CEO of Motorola, first mentioned Six Sigma on an international stage. This was right after Motorola won the new American National Quality Award, the Baldrige Award. Dr. Juran, who was 85 years old at the time, flew from his home in Wilton, Connecticut, to Los Angeles to personally present the award.

David Hutchins, a personal friend of Dr. Joseph Juran and a contributor to Dr. Juran’s work, had a close-up view of the development of the term “Six Sigma.”

According to David, before the term “Six Sigma” was used, Motorola had set up around 100 Quality Improvement teams trained using a series of 16 video tapes produced by Dr. Juran, titled “Juran on Quality Improvement.” 📼 See: Juran on Quality Planning

A keen observer at Motorola noticed that about 10% of the teams consistently achieved results significantly better than the others. Further investigation showed that these high-performing teams used statistical tools for root-cause analysis rather than guessing the causes to save time.

To encourage this rigorous approach of root-cause analysis (as taught in Dr. Juran’s videos), Bob Galvin decided to create the label “Six Sigma” to distinguish “the best from the rest.”

The term Six Sigma caught on, and, according to David, people like Mikel Harry (1951 – 2017) with a commercial perspective began to embellish it with 1.5 sigma adjustments, turning it into a ‘quasi-science.’ This attracted statistics departments from colleges and universities worldwide, who saw a promising trend.

In 1994, only five major organizations were promoting Six Sigma:

– Motorola

– Texas Instruments

– Allied Signal (now Honeywell)

– ABB

– Kodak

After Jack Welch of GE discovered Six Sigma in 1995, there was a surge of companies and universities promoting it.

David Hutchins watched it all unfold in real time!

Knowing that Dr. Joseph Juran’s work was the true original foundation of Six Sigma (and not the statistical adjustments made by Mikel Harry) should now give us comfort.

Thank you, David Hutchins, for providing this historical context to Six Sigma.

David Hutchins is a Fellow of the Chartered Quality Institute (CQI) and Principal of David Hutchins International Quality College. David is also an author of several books on Quality, TQM, Just-in-Time, Hoshin Kanri, and Quality Circles.